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Peter van Agtmael's war photography

SGT Jackson rests in the home of a suspected insurgent after a late night raid by U.S. soldiers. Two men were detained. Photograph by Peter van Agtmael.

There is an interesting interview with embedded war photographer Peter Van Agtmael at Popphoto.com and also on interviewer Jörg Colberg's own blog here. He talks about his experiences photographing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and how his photographs get used - or not. He notes that internet publishing has allowed him to have images of wounded soldiers made accessible to the American public. Certain images that he wasn't able to publish in print media. At least not in the U.S.

Click here to see his work on ABC news, with one slideshow prefixed thus:

Perhaps newspapers could publish similar disclaimers on their front page, thereby allowing them to print some graphic representations of the more unpleasant realities of war alongside the abstracted statistics...

Specialist Lucas Yaminishi holds up the bloody shoe of the victim of a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq. Nine people were killed and over 20 wounded in the bombing, one of the first of its kind in Mosul. Photograph by Peter van Agtmael

Incidentally, a statistic I came up against recently put the number of Iraqi security and police casualties at around twice that of the American forces. The number of civilian casualties is around 8 or 9 times that of these two figures combined.